The growing presence of the Internet as well as other computer networks such as intranets and extranets has brought many new applications in e-commerce and other areas. Organizations increasingly rely on such applications to carry out their business or other objectives, and devote considerable resources to ensuring that the applications perform as expected. To this end, various application management techniques have been developed.
Modern information systems are distributed over several computers. One type of information system is a service oriented architecture (SOA) system. In a SOA system, also considered a web services system, users of services provided by machines are typically other computers. Monitoring of SOA systems is important to provide reliable services as part of the SOA service.
Some transactions implemented over an SOA system are not suitable to be monitored by traditional system monitoring systems. Traditional transactions consist of a request and an immediate response generated in response to the request. The request and response typically occur between the same two machines. Some SOA system business transactions consist of asynchronous messages sent between different machines. In this case, it is possible that no one application or machine sees all request and response messages which comprise the business transaction. Additionally, the messages may occur over a span of several days, making it more difficult for existing monitoring systems to accurately track these business transactions.